PHP 8.1 is Here

News

November 26th, 2021

PHP 8.1 is Here

The PHP team announced the release of PHP 8.1 yesterday:

According to the announcement, here is a list of the main features for PHP 8.1:

Enumerations

PHP 8.1 supports Enumerations (Enums) natively, providing a rich api for defining and working with Enums:

enum Status
{
case Draft;
case Published;
case Archived;
}
function acceptStatus(Status $status) {...}

Read-only Properties

Read-only properties cannot be changed after they are initialized. You can be confident that your data classes are consistent. PHP 8.1 can reduce boilerplate by defining public properties the author does not intend to change, instead of private properties accessible via "getter" methods:

class BlogData
{
public readonly Status $status;
 
public function __construct(Status $status)
{
$this->status = $status;
}
}

Intersection Types

You can use intersection types when needing to satisfy multiple constraints at the same time:

function count_and_iterate(Iterator&Countable $value) {
foreach ($value as $val) {
echo $val;
}
 
count($value);
}

First-class Callable Syntax

You can make make a closure from a callable by calling it and passing ...:

function add(int $a, int $b) {
// ...
}
 
$add = add(...);
$add(1, 5);
$add(5, 3);

And much more...

To get up to speed on these new features, check out the PHP 8.1.0 Release Announcement page for examples before/after PHP 8.1, as well as performance improvements.

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Paul Redmond

Full stack web developer. Author of Lumen Programming Guide and Docker for PHP Developers.